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Historical fiction (Children's/YA)May 2021From far away
by Angeliki Darlasi
It was summer when Walice, along with wandering performers and the fairground, pitched up on a plot on the edge of our town. And there was a carousel at the fairground that we were dreaming of even while being awake.Walice had nothing – but we only found out about this much later.What we knew was that she was different and, as the grown-ups have told us, we should be afraid of her and avoid her. Therefore, they gave us a scarf to put it on her so that she stood out. Up until the night we found out she could do magic… This is a story on prejudice, racism, and the Romani Holocaust. On the narrow-mindedness and harshness of adults, but, also, on the intrinsic empathy of children.Mostly, it is the story of a true and generous friendship; the story of a magical summer…
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Crime & mysteryOctober 2021The Lost Boy
by Rachel Amphlett
Run. Don’t look back. When a young teenager is stabbed to death at a busy fairground, Detective Mark Turpin is assigned the task of finding the boy’s killer. But this was no random murder. Mark knows the victim, and the man who ordered his death. As he sifts through the young victim’s final days, he uncovers a powerful crime syndicate that will do anything to protect its interests. Then tragedy strikes, and suddenly Mark isn’t just trying to solve a murder – he’s fighting for his own survival. The Lost Boy is the third book in a gripping murder mystery series from USA Today bestselling author Rachel Amphlett. Read an extract here: https://www.rachelamphlett.com/books/detective-mark-turpin-crime-novels/the-lost-boy/
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2013Clowning Around
by Helen Orme
The Full Flight series of reading books are for children and young adults aged 8 to 14 and over who are struggling to read. Each book has been carefully written for those with a reading age of approximately 7 to 8, but are packed full of adventure and brilliant illustrations to really grab the reader interest. Cara, Jodie and Jamie-Lee have somehow found themselves in the middle of a fairground. However, there is no fun to be found at this fair.
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Autobiography: generalMarch 2010Cheapjack
The Adventures of a Fortune-Teller. Knocker-Worker and Mounted Pitcher
by Philip Allingham
New edition of unique 1930s fairground memoir which achieved extraordinary success on first publication in both UK and US. Philip Allingham, brother to detective novelist Margery, was a young man uncertain of his direction in life. Setting out from his London office one morning, sporting a top hat and tails, he discovered his vocation as a fortune teller and salesman in the farigrounds and market places of working class England in the Depression era. Cheapjack is of interest to linguists as marking the first printed use of many Romany words. Essentially it is a delightful and completely individual coming-of-age autobiography, told with modesty and humour. This new edition includes many illustrations as well as biographical material and an introduction by Francis Wheen. It has been well reviewed in national newpapers.
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Marraton
by Sam Smith
‘Marra’ in the still active dialect of West Cumbrian coastal towns means ‘mate’ or ‘pal’. Howard Dawson is a Police Community Support Officer in Marraton. Divorced, sole carer of his epileptic father, Howard’s in and out-of-uniform life is drift, losing himself in reveries - on the true purpose of the offshore turbines, what goes on in a chapel with no posters, the noises coming from strange allotment beasts.... And then dead cats stuffed with snail shells start getting left in gardens, there’s a spate of robberies with odd things taken - a pub’s legendary flugelhorn, a used kettle .… Howard also has to deliver talks to schoolchildren on graffiti and vandalism, and to prevent fairground mayhem… he even ends up rescuing a girl from a mudslide. Come the end of the book the catkiller is found, if not apprehended, and some of the stolen property is returned to its owners.
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Biography: arts & entertainmentWilliam Haggar, (1851-1925)
Fairground Film-maker
by Peter Yorke
Biography of William Haggar, a pioneer of the cinema. Written by Haggar's great-grandson, the book draws on oral reminiscences, unpublished family memoirs and contemporary press reports. It tells the rags-to-riches story of a travelling theatrical who became one of Britain's select band of pioneer film-makers. Containing information on Victorian portable theatres, fairground bioscope shows and Haggar's films, it is a "must" for anyone interested in the popular entertainment of 100 years ago.Contents:- Ten chapters deal with Haggar's life (1851-1925) from his birth at Dedham, Essex, via forty years of travelling with portable theatres and his own Bioscope Exhibition, to respected retirement in Aberdare, South Wales. The last chapter relates the subsequent rediscovery of his films and the recognition of their pioneering quality. - Illustrations include contemporary family portraits, photographs of his huge ornate bioscope sh ow-fronts and stills from his films. - Eight factual appendices provide supporting lists and descriptions of plays and films; and the full texts of particular newspaper articles alluded to in the main narrative. - Notes on sources of information, references and other details. The author, William Haggar's great-grandson Peter Yorke was educated at Queen Elizabeth's Hospital, Bristol, and Pembroke College, Cambridge, graduating in Classics in 1960. Much of his working life was spent representing the University of East Anglia, Norwich, as client to architects, consultants and contractors constructing the then "new university". Retiring in 1996 and moving to Dorset, he has researched his great-grandfather's life and times, travelling throughout England and Wales and to Australia to meet his Haggar relatives to consult their memories for inclusion in this book.
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Biography: arts & entertainmentWilliam Haggar
Fairground Film Maker
by Peter Yorke
Biography of William Haggar, a pioneer of the cinema. Written by Haggar's great-grandson, the book draws on oral reminiscences, unpublished family memoirs and contemporary press reports. It tells the rags-to-riches story of a travelling theatrical who became one of Britain's select band of pioneer film-makers. Containing information on Victorian portable theatres, fairground bioscope shows and Haggar's films, it is a "must" for anyone interested in the popular entertainment of 100 years ago.Contents:- Ten chapters deal with Haggar's life (1851-1925) from his birth at Dedham, Essex, via forty years of travelling with portable theatres and his own Bioscope Exhibition, to respected retirement in Aberdare, South Wales. The last chapter relates the subsequent rediscovery of his films and the recognition of their pioneering quality. - Illustrations include contemporary family portraits, photographs of his huge ornate bioscope sh ow-fronts and stills from his films. - Eight factual appendices provide supporting lists and descriptions of plays and films; and the full texts of particular newspaper articles alluded to in the main narrative. - Notes on sources of information, references and other details. The author, William Haggar's great-grandson Peter Yorke was educated at Queen Elizabeth's Hospital, Bristol, and Pembroke College, Cambridge, graduating in Classics in 1960. Much of his working life was spent representing the University of East Anglia, Norwich, as client to architects, consultants and contractors constructing the then "new university". Retiring in 1996 and moving to Dorset, he has researched his great-grandfather's life and times, travelling throughout England and Wales and to Australia to meet his Haggar relatives to consult their memories for inclusion in this book.
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FictionNunca serás un verdadero Gondra (You’ll never be a true Gondra)
by Borja Ortiz de Gondra
Borja works as a translator for an international organization in New York, where he lives with his partner, John. One night, he receives a phone call from his cousin, who informs him that his brother has just died and that the cousin has something to give him. Many years earlier, in the 1990s, Borja left the Basque Country and cut his ties with a family and a land that were poisoned by hatred and incomprehension. In the United States he became a different person, someone who had torn up his roots and buried his past in order to embrace a present in which he could live, freely, in another language. But one phone call can be enough to demolish the highest wall. Now, this ill-fated son of a family that has fallen on hard times finds he is the sole heir of the dilapidated mansion that looks out over the sea from its vantage point at the top of the town of Algorta. Only he can open the door and decide what to do with so many years of pain and silence. But healing the wounds is not easy and writing a book about the past may only serve to make them deeper. Ortiz de Gondra has written a perceptive exploration of identity, memory and the possibility of shaping one’s own destiny beyond any boundaries that our family and our homeland may impose on us.
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FictionPrišleki/Newcomers
by Lojze Kovačič
The three-part autobiographical series begins in 1938 with the expulsion of the Kovačič family from their home in Switzerland and their settlement in the father’s home country of Slovenia, then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It is narrated by a ten-year-old boy, a perennial outsider, a boy who never fit in in either Switzerland or Slovenia and was viewed with suspicion by adults and his peers. The work includes haunting, deeply thought-provoking descriptions of this estrangement as seen through the eyes of the child – in many ways a naïve boy, yet one who was forced to become an adult at an early age.Newcomers are Kovačič’s central work on the vortex of World War II and the post-war period, covering all the political, ideological and social conflicts of the 20th century and standing as a tragic chronicle of the recent past. A canonical, extensive and difficult autobiographical work, Newcomers is considered a literary masterpiece of the 20th century and is oftentimes compared to the oeuvres of popular modern authors such as Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgård, as well as classic authors, among them Nabokov and Tolstoy.
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Literary FictionJune 2021This Good Book
by Iain Hood
‘Sometimes I wonder, if I had known that it was going to take me fourteen years to paint this painting of the Crucifixion with Douglas as Jesus, and what it would take for me to paint this painting, would I have been as happy as I was then?’ Susan Alison MacLeod, a Glasgow School of Art graduate with a dark sense of humour, first lays eyes on Douglas MacDougal at a party in 1988, and resolves to put him on the cross in the Crucifixion painting she’s been sketching out, but her desire to create ‘good’ art and a powerful, beautiful portrayal means that a final painting doesn’t see the light of day for fourteen years. Over the same years, Douglas’s ever-more elaborately designed urine-based installations bring him increasing fame, prizes and commissions, while his modelling for Susan Alison, who continues to work pain and suffering on to the canvas, takes place mostly in the shadows. This Good Book is a wickedly funny, brilliantly observed novel that spins the moral compass and plays with notions of creating art.
